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The Post Syrian Civil War Image of Hezbollah: the Legitimization

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The Post Syrian Civil War Image of Hezbollah: the Legitimization The Post Syrian Civil War image of Hezbollah: The legitimization struggle after 2011 Mariana Díaz García 2067617 Leiden University Supervisor: Dr. Marina Calculli Thesis for the M.A. Modern Middle Eastern Studies July, 2019 Index Introduction ............................................................................................................................3 Literature review ....................................................................................................................4 The role of ideological restructuration in achieving legitimacy..........................................................4 Restructuring Islamism as an ideology................................................................................................5 Political discourse as a tool for legitimacy…………………………………………………………11 Methodology .......................................................................................................................14 Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA)…………………………………………………………………15 Chapter overview .................................................................................................................18 1. Theoretical framework .....................................................................................................19 1.2 Hezbollah’s identity construction ................................................................................................20 1.1.2 Identity construction from 1985 to 2011...................................................................................21 1.1.3 The ideological reconstruction: the 2009 Manifesto ................................................................24 1.1.4 Framing the Janus-faced behavior: The Arab Uprisings and the Syrian Civil War .................26 2. Discourse in the legitimization process ............................................................................28 2.1 The need for a “all-embracing” justification ...............................................................................29 2.1.1 The Manichean moral justification ...........................................................................................30 2.2 The justification to the Shiite community: Hezbollah as a resistance movement .......................32 2.3 The takfiri justification: risking the sectarian discord .................................................................33 2.4 The Jihadi justification ................................................................................................................36 2.5 The divine victory (al-nasr al-ilahı ̄) justification .......................................................................36 3. The justification to the national allies: Hezbollah as a national political actor ................38 3.1 The Palestine justification: the analogical fallacy .......................................................................39 3.2 The Israeli invasion justification: appealing to national sovereignty ..........................................40 3.3 The “imminent expansion” justification: Lebanese national security under threat .....................41 3.4 The “incapable Lebanese government” justification: the State versus the non-State .................41 4. The justification to the international community: contesting the role of the state ...........43 4.1 The support of institutions justification .......................................................................................44 4.2 War on Terror justification: the appropriation of the discourse ..................................................46 4.3 The ethics of war justification: hawkishness legitimized ...........................................................47 4.4 Defending the “righteous” justification: embracing the Axis of Resistance ...............................49 5. Conclusion ........................................................................................................................51 Bibliography .........................................................................................................................54 Annexes ................................................................................................................................60 2 Introduction On March 15, 2011 the influence of the Arab Uprising that started with the Jasmine Revolution in Tunisia, materialized in the Syrian city of Deraa. The role of Hezbollah as a supporter of the opposition movements was challenged with conciliating their ideology established in the 2009 The New Hezbollah Manifesto with the recent changes in the regional context. The series of protests that became known as the “Arab Spring” were seen as part of the wave of demonstrations against authoritarian regimes in Egypt and Tunisia and would later spread to Morocco, Libya, Yemen and Bahrain. Hezbollah’s support of the revolutionary nature and ideology of the opposition movements became an issue when the anti-government demonstrations began in Syria and the organization suddenly contradicted its previous posture by backing the regime. This was done while endorsing the Bashar al-Assad regime in 2011, and later in 2013, a joint military intervention was started alongside the Syrian forces in al-Qusayr. The Janus-faced behavior of the organization had an immediate negative impact on the image that Hezbollah had been building through a pragmatic and selective legitimation process. As a result, Hezbollah was confronted with the need to justify their imminent contradiction to the resistance ideology that defined their relationship with the Shiite community and the transgression of the Baabda Declaration, in which Lebanon confirmed its neutrality in the Syrian civil war, and that risked their national legitimacy and their intervention in a foreign conflict that exposed the organization to international retaliation. In this scenario, how does Hezbollah react to the challenges to the legitimacy of its organization?. In light of the aforementioned, this thesis will aim to analyze and identify the way in which Hezbollah justify the intervention in Syria to their support groups at the local, national and international level. Hezbollah has used a process of identity construction to achieve legitimacy by using the socio-political changes that affected the environment surrounding the organization’s development (Alagha, 2011a, 30). Therefore, the hypothesis is that Hezbollah uses ideology as the base of their identity in a process of self-redefinition to target the interests of their different support groups as they interact with different factors that modify the current circumstances. This research focuses on Hezbollah’s creation of 3 meaning in the ideological discourse in order to justify their actions and preserve their legitimacy at three different levels of target audiences (communal, national, international) by developing diverse context models (van Dijk, 2006, 21) according to each audience’s particular interests. The strategy is mainly based on the appropriation of rhetoric devices that connect to the existing ideology of the target audience, regardless of whether or not it was originally influenced by Hezbollah. Justifications based on ideological restructuration are required because “ideology is also a powerful informal constraint on behavior, and, as such it helps an organization to minimize the transaction costs related to information and compliance” (Berti, 2013, 25); moreover, the improvement in communication with the support base increases their legitimacy and creates a competitive advantage regarding other rival actors. Diverse justifications that create meaning have been identified in all three levels of discourse. They should, however, not be analyzed as isolated explanations. Rather, they have been separated and classified with the objective of demonstrating how the justifications create coherence by entwining meanings across the three levels. Literature Review The role of ideological restructuration in achieving legitimacy This section will give an overview of the existing literature concerning the main premise of this thesis, identity construction as a source of legitimacy in political actors. In addition, a section specifically dealing with organizations that based their ideology on Islamism will be included. The first group of authors that analyse the role of ideology in identity construction take an approach that defies the linear study of the process and is mainly based on critical realism (Knio 2013, Berti 2013, Alagha 2011a). Understanding the transformation of organizations in order to identify the key aspects of achieving constant legitimation has been a central topic in the study of armed groups that have reached a level of expansion to the realm of politics. Their analysis of the interaction between the different elements that affect the internal transformation of the organization can be adopted to explain Hezbollah’s 4 legitimacy in diverse contexts throughout its history and the dilemma presented due to their Janus-faced behaviour. Berti defies the linear-history paradigm and its implication regarding the automatic adherence to the “democratic rules of the game” that has been used to analyse the creation of political wings (Berti, 2013, 4). In this paradigm, the armed groups that enter politics are expected to eventually evolve into a moderate organization that renounces the use of violent means since violence itself is seen as a by-product of exclusion from the political system (Berti, 2013, 24). Berti’s cyclical development
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